Protesters’ shrouding of the Thomas Jefferson statue last week at the University of Virginia was unsettling and ill-omened.

And it wasn’t just the shrouding itself that was the problem; it was all the rhetoric that accompanied it — including signs claiming that Mr. Jefferson was a “racist” and a “rapist.”

We’ve argued before that it is narrow-minded to apply 21st-century mores to 19th-century behaviors, so we won’t belabor that here, except to say that it is possible — indeed, it is a sign of mature thinking — to be able to honor the good in someone without blindly accepting the bad.